


One Rope to Salvation

by burglebezzlement



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Earp Homestead, Episode 1x01, Gen, Missing Scene, The well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 01:42:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7488435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of happened to Doc between the well and Shorty’s. Where did he find his clothing? And why was Peacemaker waiting for Wynonna at the bottom of the well?</p><p>
  <em>The road Doc remembers as a dirt track has been covered in some strange, resilient surfacing that keeps down the dust and feels soft under his feet as he walks down the yellow line at the center. Useful thing, that would be, for keeping your horse on track after a long night’s drinking.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Rope to Salvation

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a prompt from a nonny on FFA who requested the missing scenes between Doc climbing out of the well and turning up at Shorty’s. 
> 
> The existence of a cave branching off from the well came up in Emily Andras’s Reddit AMA.

Salvation looks like a rope.

Ordinary rope, as best he can tell in the mid-day gloom at the bottom of the well. Doc twists it around his hand and gives a tug — it’s attached to something. Something that might bear his weight. 

The second thing Doc notices is the gun. It’s missing. 

He’s left it at the bottom of the well for years, since it first showed up in what he now thinks of as the Year of the Gun. Stupid and sentimental of him, wanting to keep it as close as he could to what little he has of the light. 

He recognized it, of course. Knew it by the feel in his hand. Wyatt Earp’s gun, thrown down his well. It’s not a coincidence and he’d think the Stone Witch did it do rub his face in Wyatt’s death if he weren’t sure to his bones that Wyatt’s been dead many a long year already. 

Whatever happened down here, whatever left the rope and stole away the gun, happened while he was getting water, through the gap in the stone blocks three up and into the cave system and over to the stream. It’s a daily ritual, every day for he doesn’t want to think how many days. He leaves when the cave-dark at the bottom of the well starts turning into mere darkness, navigating to the river by feel and drinking of the water. When he comes back, the light in the well’s almost a twilight. It’s not much, but for Doc, it feels like coming into the sun.

He thinks about it, for a minute longer, wondering if there’s someone at the top of this rope, waiting for him to come up. Waiting in ambush.

And then he decides that he’d be so grateful to see the sunlight, to see another living being, that it’d be worth it.

* * *

He feels like he’s in full sunlight when he gets halfway up. When he gets to the top, it’s like the light is burning into him, blinding him, making his eyes run.

He doesn’t care. There’s air up here, and even with his stinging eyes held shut against the pain, the warmth and light of the mid-day sun is the most beautiful thing he’s felt since he held Wyatt’s gun again.

He rests against the outside wall of the well, breathing hard, letting his skin soak in the light. The feeling of rocks at his back is familiar, but these rocks are warm and dry, and it is all the difference to him. 

When he can squint his eyes open (and oh, how sweet the view of the sunlight on the mountains), he starts walking. 

He remembers the way to Wyatt’s land. He spent years trying to map out what he could recollect of the lay of the place, trying to figure out if his cave system could ever intersect the Purgatory mine shafts. 

The Earp homestead he remembers was a tar paper-covered shack sitting in the middle of the wilds. This homestead isn’t the same, but Doc squints up and reads EARP over the cattle gate before walking in. 

It’s the house Wyatt always told him he’d build. Low to the ground, with a wide porch looking out to the road, sitting on the parcel of land he’d staked out before Doc’s untimely departure.

Doc’s hopes that someone is here are broken before he gets to the door. He picks through trash, debris, weirdly-twisted metal and dead plants. The house is abandoned, and he doesn’t want to think about how long he’s been under, that Wyatt and all his descendants are gone. 

Inside, there’s a cunning patent stove in the corner, but the parlor is strewn with trash. Doc looks through, looking for a clue about what happened here — nothing good, to judge by the broken glass on the floor.

 So no clues about the current Earps, whoever they might be, but Doc has hope that one of the original Earps might have left something behind for him. He might not have been able to help his dearest friend build his homestead, but he remembers how Wyatt thought. Wyatt was a straightforward lawman, but he could think twisty when he needed to, and Doc knows he’d have built hiding places into his home.

Doc tries three bits of wall before he finds it, low, under the eaves — a panel that pulls up, showing him the space between the wall and the pitch of the roof. 

Inside is an old wooden box, covered in dust and faded pasteboard labels for oranges. Doc’s valise is inside, just as he remembers leaving it in that hotel. 

He’s been in the well so long, one of his silk cravats shatters in his hands when he picks it up.

His best hat is still here.

* * *

The area around Wyatt’s homestead has grown up while Doc’s been in the well. There’s a house every mile, at least — sometimes two houses in a quarter mile. The road Doc remembers as a dirt track has been covered in some strange, resilient surfacing that keeps down the dust and feels soft under his feet as he walks down the yellow line at the center. Useful thing, that would be, for keeping your horse on track after a long night’s drinking.

A brightly-colored carriage with people inside comes screaming down the road at him, moving faster than a train even though there are no rails for it to run on and there is no horse to power it. He stands to watch it go by, and then jumps when it makes a loud noise at him.

After that, he walks on one side of the road, until another carriage drives up and then slows down and follows him, bellowing at him until he gets off the soft surface of the road entirely. 

The telegraph lines grow wider as he walks — thicker than he remembers them, and he doesn’t remember the telegraph ever running out this way from town. 

When another carriage bellows at him, he realizes that he must look a sight, loaded down with hair and beard and still wearing his rags from the well. He stops at one of the houses, breaks in through the back door after making sure nobody’s around. He figures out the washroom, after a few false starts, and finds a lightweight razor that does a good-enough job of cutting the beard from his face.

He’s clean again, after who knows how long underground, and he looks down into the wash basin before he can meet his own eyes in the mirror.

* * *

The saloon’s where he remembers it, in the center of town. Inside, it’s both exactly what he remembers, and completely different.

The lights are strange — they’re not gas, and he can’t imagine how they get the steady burn that lights the glassy tubes twisted into shapes in the windows. The mirrors are silvered to an impossible degree of precision. There’s a strange music box, singing to itself in the corner.

He keeps his face steady. Doesn’t betray his interest in the swoopy lights or any of the other impossible things. He’s Doc Holliday, and his poker face is feared wherever miners gather together to gamble their gold away. 

And he recognizes the worn wood from when they first came here. Wyatt hunting after a demon — a demon Doc figured couldn’t possibly be true. Doc running card games, mostly, or meeting up with the ladies who had come out to provide companionship to the men of the frontier. 

He walks up to the bar, prepared to order a drink, and then — he sees it. Sitting out in the open, reflecting the light.

A gun he knows so well, he could recognize it in the darkness, by just the weight of it and how it balances in its hand. 

The gun’s owner is dressed in the strange get-up of the other women he’s seen in town, but she’s got Wyatt’s eyes. Her brown hair is loose, down over her shoulders, and she’s looking at him like she’s trouble.

There’s Earp written all over her.

“Mercy me,” Doc says. “Is that what I think it is, little lady?”

He smiles, and looks up to meet her eyes.


End file.
